Re: A Fire Upon the Deep

On Fri, 6 Jan 1995, Wei Dai wrote:
> In article <[email protected]>, [email protected]
>
> There was some recent talk about network agent technology on this list.
> Vinge mentions almost in passing how an entire planet (or maybe planets)
> was taken over by an "intelligent net packet". Makes me rather nervous
> about things like Magic Cap...
>
does anynoe have any information about intelligent agents? I mean I know
about filter and stuff, but they arent intelligent agents. I assume one
would be something like the WWW worm and other searching scripts that
have a database of information to cross-reference their finds and decide
what to send back to you. the WWWWorm is a good centralized illustration
of this, with a searchable index of HTML pages. Or is there osmethign
else that makes upa "intelligent agent"
> One more thing that's marginally related to cypherpunks (hey I really
> like this book so I'll take any chance I can to talk about it ;-) is
> the idea that the efficiency of distributed computation (and distributed
> intelligence) depends on high bandwidth and low latency of the communication
> medium. Since anonymity seems to have rather high costs in terms of
> bandwidth and latency (compare anonymous e-mail with internet video
> conferencing or even with normal e-mail), this implies that
> an organization of anonymous agents will not work as efficiently as
> a similar orginzation whose members are not concerned about
> anonymity.
i disagree storngly. anonimity with almost no increase in latency or
decrease in bandwidth is easily viable. Especially if it was a group of
coleagues planning to get together, I mean the remailers and stuff are a
different thing altogehter, but ytalk or another confrencing system with
untracable features is no problem, hell just a conference call dialing up
from payphones, ora favorite hacker trick of running a conference of a
COCOT. etc....
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